Mitt Romney rehashes 2012 for 2 books

Mitt Romney, who has largely avoided the public spotlight since his presidential election defeat last November, has granted interviews to the authors of two forthcoming books about the 2012 campaign, according to two sources familiar with the conversations.

The former Massachusetts governor has given interviews for Dan Balz’s “Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America,” and Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s “Double Down: Game Change 2012,” the sources said.

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Mitt: It kills me to not be president

Balz, the chief correspondent for the Washington Post, is set to publish his telling of the 2012 campaign in August. It follows the account of the 2008 election that Balz published with the late Haynes Johnson, “The Battle for America 2008: The Story of An Extraordinary Election.”

The Halperin and Heilemann book – a sequel to the 2008 election saga “Game Change” – is due out in early November, around the anniversary of President Barack Obama’s reelection.

The two books are expected to expand on and solidify the early assessments of what happened in Obama’s reelection fight – how the president won a second term despite a weak economy and why Romney came up short in an evidently winnable race.

Romney has given few interviews since the end of the presidential campaign. When he has appeared in public, he has spent relatively little time picking over the details of the last election.

Mitt and Ann Romney gave their first post-election interview to Fox News in March, and the unsuccessful presidential nominee said he doesn’t “spend my life looking back.”

“You look back at the campaign and say, OK, what did the president do well? And you acknowledge that his campaign did a number of things very effectively. Of course, you rehearse all the mistakes that you made,” Romney reflected. “And then you think about the things that were out of our control. But you move on.”